Ecuador Pizza

Our family are big fans of pizza!  What family isn’t right?  Well, we always make a point of finding a pizza shop in the towns we visit, and try the local flavors.

Surprisingly, or not, there are some pretty good pizza’s in Latin America that certainly beat the U.S. national pizza chains.  We do see big U.S. franchise food retailers in some of the larger cities, McD’s, KFC, and Subway can usually be found in towns larger than 100,000 people, or in towns that cater to tourists.

Luckily, we don’t visit many of either of these so our food choices are always new, different, and unique for just about every meal we eat out.

Pizza is certainly a universal food, and you can find a pizza shop in the most out of the way places.  When we visited Costa Rica and lived in the Jungles of Montezuma there were 6 pizza shops in the town of maybe 100 people!  It was the craziest thing, but apparently during high season the town gets jumping and there is a need for this many shops.  Pizza is cheap…so for the backpacking crowd pizza is an affordable meal.

One of the shops in town was also an Italian restaurant where they made all of their products from scratch.  Turns out the owner is a very talented baker…and Italian chef…and the food was remarkeable, made from scratch daily.  We only ate their twice in the 30 days we visited because the prices were a little out of our price range, but the pizza was so good he could have competed with the best of New York.

Speaking of New York, we found a small hole in the wall pizza joint in Alejuela Costa Rica that made a great pizza.  There were maybe seats for 12 people in the place and he was only open for dinner, and as it turns out he used to live and work in New York.  He made a delicious, authentic, New York style thin crust pizza that was to die for…

Or the time we got caught by a tropical downpour in Panama.  We made a dash for cover under the awning of a restaurant.  The rain pounded us for more than an hour…but during that time Gina met the owner of a small Shrimp Fleet and spoke with him, and I watched pizza being made in an outdoor, wood-fired pizza oven.  We had just eaten lunch so we did not get to try this pizza, but it sure looked good…

Panama wood-fired pizza oven

During our trip to Ecuador last March we found a favorite pizza shop here in Cotacachi, Ecuador.  This trip we have spent a lot of time making our own homemade pizza’s!  As many of you know we own another website, www.homemade-pizza-made-easy.com that we built from scratch more than a year ago.  We developed the entire site ourselves, and it was a great way for us to learn how to build websites.

Well, with time on our hands we are now spending a lot of time making pizza and trying different techniques.  We have had to improvise, and use tools that we can find to make our pizza’s better…we can’t just run out and buy the tools, equipment, and ingredients we can in the U.S., but it is fun to try and find solutions.

Here is an example…

Next door to our Condo a worker has been working on a building and the other day we were walking by and he was inside.  Gina stopped and asked him if he had any leftover floor tiles after he was done laying the tile floor he was working on, would he sell us a tile.  Well, he was very generous and just gave us a tile at that very moment…typical generousity of Ecuadorians.

homemade pizza in ecuador

So now we have a baking stone for our pizza’s.  A baking stone allows you to cook the bottom and get it nice and crispy.  We will make some bread and give the worker some homemade bread to show our thanks for his generosity.

So, while not typically Ecuadorian…we are finding making pizza’s a fun, delicious way to make healthy, inexpensive meals for our family, learn about some of the local ingredients, and find creative ways to solve the issues we face…and make some friends along the way.

I wonder what the pizza is like in Peru ??